In an enterprise computing environment, for example, an office of a business, a number of personal computers, workstations, servers and the like, along with other devices such as mass storage subsystems, internal network interfaces, and external network interfaces, are typically interconnected to provide an integrated environment in which information may be generated, accessed from external sources, and shared among various users. Commonly, users perform a variety of operations including order receipt, manufacturing, shipping, billing, inventory control, document preparation and management, e-mail, web browsing, and other operations in which creation, access, and sharing of data is beneficial.
Currently, security against malicious attacks and malicious software (termed “malware”) is typically provided for an enterprise using a variety of different security products that are each normally arranged to monitor only a portion of enterprise-wide data. That is, security products are arranged as separate local “islands” where each product monitors, assesses, and takes action with respect to different parts of the data within the enterprise. For example, an enterprise may utilize a combination of security products such as a product that protects host computers in the enterprise, an edge firewall product, a network intrusion detection system (“NIDS”) product, a network access protection (“NAP”) product, and other discrete security products in order to provide security for the various different parts of the enterprise.
While these security products often perform satisfactorily in many applications, detection of security incidents often suffers from undesirably high levels of false-positive and false-negative occurrences as a result of the monitoring of only partial enterprise security data. It has also been difficult to provide effective common management across all the enterprise security product islands. Current attempts to correlate enterprise-wide security data have high management and maintenance costs and have problems in scaling. More effective enterprise security management would be desirable to enable a single enterprise-wide view to enable security administrators to define and enforce clear, simple, and unified enterprise-wide policies for automatic responses to security incidents.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.